Related papers: Informational Autocrats, Diverse Societies
Social groups with widely different music tastes, political convictions, and religious beliefs emerge and disappear on scales from extreme subcultures to mainstream mass-cultures. Both the underlying social structure and the formation of…
We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural…
One frequently given explanation for why autocrats maintain corrupt and inefficient institutions is that the autocrats benefit personally even though the citizens of their countries are worse off. The empirical evidence does not support…
The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While contemporary policy debates prioritize fully autonomous generative agents and synthetic content, this paper offers a conceptual…
The possible impact of algorithmic recommendation on the autonomy and free choice of Internet users is being increasingly discussed, especially in terms of the rendering of information and the structuring of interactions. This paper aims at…
In recent years, social media companies have grappled with defining and enforcing content moderation policies surrounding political content on their platforms, due in part to concerns about political bias, disinformation, and polarization.…
In the 21st Century information environment, adversarial actors use disinformation to manipulate public opinion. The distribution of false, misleading, or inaccurate information with the intent to deceive is an existential threat to the…
This work investigates a dynamic variant of Bayesian persuasion, in which a strategic sender seeks to influence a receiver's belief over time through controlling the timing of the information disclosure, under resource constraints. We…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
Models to mimic the transmission of information in financial markets are introduced. As an attempt to generate the demand process, we distinguish between dictatorship associations, where groups of agents rely on one of them to make…
The proliferation of information disseminated by public/social media has made decision-making highly challenging due to the wide availability of noisy, uncertain, or unverified information. Although the issue of uncertainty in information…
We address the fundamental problem of selection under uncertainty by modeling it from the perspective of Bayesian persuasion. In our model, a decision maker with imperfect information always selects the option with the highest expected…
In many decision-making scenarios, individuals strategically choose what information to disclose to optimize their own outcomes. It is unclear whether such strategic information disclosure can lead to good societal outcomes. To address this…
Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
Language model agents are poised to mediate how people navigate and act online. If the companies that already dominate internet search, communication, and commerce -- or the firms trying to unseat them -- control these agents, the resulting…
We investigate the collective behavior of a system of social agents subject to the competition between two mass media influences considered as external fields. We study under what conditions either of two mass media with different…
Policymakers face a broader challenge of how to view AI capabilities today and where does society stand in terms of those capabilities. This paper surveys AI capabilities and tackles this very issue, exploring it in context of political…